The Extraordinaries

Chapter Sixteen: Annie

Connor pounces on me the moment Elise and Fiona are out the door, his eyes wide with desperation. It's odd to see him change like this, from lackluster to energetic in no more than an instant. He reaches out his rawed hand and clutches mine, his finger cold.

"Delaney," he says. It surprises me how much force that one word has. He has to know; I can tell. I wonder if he moved here because of her, if he thought maybe he could track her down on his own.

"Yes," I say. My voice sounds strange, like a purr. It's the same sound it had the other day when I was speaking to Elise, that reminder of I have power over you.

"Please," he says. "Anything you can tell me at all. I... I meant to go talk to her, but it... it burnt down before I got the chance."

"I can't imagine," I say softly, and there's that purring again. Connor raises his eyebrows at me, and I blush. "I mean, I'm so sorry. You must miss her."

He shrugs. "I do and I don't," he says quietly. "I spent nearly ten years without her. Honestly, I was living on what I imagined her to be like. She was just a little girl the last time I saw her, you know."

"But didn't you say you'd gone to one of our performances?" I say, but I know how foolish it is of me. Those performances weren't the same is actually speaking to someone face-to-face.

He nods. "I was seventeen," he says. "She'd only been gone two years, but I wasn't able to recognize her. You all looked... you all looked sort of the same, in a way. Sort of... not just human." His cheeks redden, and I know he thinks he must sound entirely absurd. "You have to know what I mean," he begs, and I nod, just to make the pain in his face go away. "You sort of have that quality," he says. "But not quite. It was something... I don't know, something bigger. Before she left, though, she was like you. Beautiful, and in a sort of scary way."

I wonder if he means it as a compliment, telling me I'm beautiful. I've learned, long ago, to see it as something else. A given, almost. A part of me. Nothing to be excited about. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I feel a kind of defeat, like I'm so accustomed to simply being beautiful that there's nothing I can do to ever be any kind of surprise.

"Ah," I say, because I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now. I drum my fingers along the plastic tabletop, and I realize then that I miss Elise. I don't like being surrounded by ordinaries. It's more isolating than being all by myself. It brings me to that notion that there's something wrong with me, that I'm trapped in between two different worlds, that I should let go of the other one and commit to being here, just here. Until I was thirteen and left for the Hawthorne, I was sure I would be miserable forever. I thought I was the only one, and what I learned is that ordinaries don't want to try and understand you if you're different.

"I've spent my whole life in sort of a state of confusion," Connor says. "About why Del had to leave, about what made her so goddamn special. Can you... can you tell me anything?"

I glance around. "Not here," I say.

I expect him to argue, but he gives a quick nod. "Of course," he says. "But you do know what it was? You can tell me?"

I know I shouldn't, that he would never understand, but I should try. I don't have to tell Elise, and I doubt Connor will tell anybody. It's his sister; I'm sure he wants to keep it a secret, close in his heart.

"Of course," I say.

It takes a while for that moment to come, and I realize as the day goes on that I'm actually nervous, that there's a pit of worry clenched up in my stomach. I wish I could say what I'm even worried about, but there's far too much. It was just a few days ago that Elise and I were fine. Two friends, just friends, living a life separated from everything else. We didn't have to worry about paying for things, or about Keaton, or about our families thinking us dead. And I wasn't planning to betray her, telling a stranger everything about us.